


Loyal Hounds & All Involved

by Chromat1cs



Series: Basingstoke Diaries [13]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Arrest, Editor!Remus, M/M, Marauders' Era, Mechanic!Sirius, Ministry of Magic, Post Hogwarts AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-24
Updated: 2018-01-24
Packaged: 2019-03-09 01:04:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,348
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13470429
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chromat1cs/pseuds/Chromat1cs
Summary: As Sirius has watched changes in the world around him morph slow and heavy like time itself, he has never expected they would lead to him being dragged into some Ministry official’s office with his wrists cuffed—but he is continually surprised by his ability to misjudge his decisions.





	Loyal Hounds & All Involved

“Looking for our hands like castanetas,  
Sitting in a circle like Geneva,  
With the Berlin Wall falling in our head  
On the Mexican day of the dead—  
Say a loyal hound never leaves his master’s grave!  
Stay with him if he falls underneath this wave…”

— Fionn Regan, “Babushka-Yai Ya” from _The Meetings of the Waters_

 

—

Sirius ignores the shove to his shoulder the first two times. The pub is crowded. It happens. 

He’s due to meet Remus here and he’s late, but Remus is also late so he feels marginally less guilty about it. His hands are still faintly smudged with the essence of blackened grease from a long day’s work, staining the whorls of his fingerprints like the most pointless sort of tattoo. He thumbs idly at the tracks of condensation on the sweating pint glass before him to pass the residue off on the moisture, an inky watercolor smear as the droplets slide down the vessel to fuse with the bar top. 

_Merlin, boredom makes you soppy,_ Sirius growls inwardly, killing the idle reverie with a deep gulp of ale. He can see the image of Remus fussing over somebody else’s work, bent over the manuscript as he tends to do in the study back at the flat, squinting even though there’s a lamp right beside him and his reading glasses should work just fine—

Sirius feels his shoulder jump with the force of another shove, and he turns with a twinge of annoyance that drags his top lip up to catch on one of his canines in an unconscious sneer. “You alright, mate?”

The wizard behind him is a dour type, red hair thinning but still dark enough at his temples to betray a middling age. His eyes are small and deep-set beneath a heavy brow, and he’s holding a pint of dark ale in a heavily-ringed, ham-shaped hand. Sirius’ insides twinge with distaste when he notices the man has mixed gold and silver indiscriminately. _Tacky sod._

“S’crowded,” the man grumbles, but his glare doesn’t soften with the half-apology. Sirius ignores the burble of unease in his stomach and turns back to the bar without releasing the sass readied on his tongue. Something tells him those rings are less for show and far more for punching. 

Sirius tries to keep drinking and waiting without letting the itch of knowing a twat is lurking in the pub get too far under his skin. Remus is getting later and later, and the stupid game show on the little telly at the other end of the bar in which a pretty witch tries to decide which of the identically-coiffed wizards she wants to date is getting more and more boring. Sirius should also probably stop drinking these pints so quickly, _What is this, three—?_

Sirius feels another shove, harder than the last. Two is an accident, three is an annoyance, but four is a fucking tosser. He whirls to see the same brute behind him and stands, drawing himself up but still a few inches short of the offender’s towering height. Sirius’ pulse quickens to life like a startled horse, already on edge for having to wait so long.

“What,” Sirius spits. He makes sure to dredge up as much of Walburga’s leftover genetics as possible in the single word.

“I seen you in here before,” the man growls, courage apparently screwed up to sit in the grotesque cluster of his lips. Sirius can smell the staleness of sour hops on his breath and lets his nose crimp with the disgust of it. 

“You and half of Basingstoke,” Sirius replies with whip-sharp crispness. “Congratulations. Doesn’t give you leave to be a todger.”

“I seen you with that other fairy. Don’t like that much. S’not natural, that.” The man continues, and Sirius’ guts wrench with sudden and protective fury. He can take abuse in spades, but any plain bastard slinging it in Remus’ direction answers to the rage of Sirius’ dormant Slytherin streak.

“And so’s your mum, you bleeding fuck,” Sirius hisses. “Do you want to have this conversation outside?” He seizes sick pride at the way the other man’s lumpy face contorts with rage and hardly hears the barkeep cut in frantically. 

“Oi, not in here,” the small man sputters, waving his dishrag as if he could brush away the conflict. “Not in here, take it out of doors. Throw a hex in my pub and you’re _done.”_

The glowering man leans past Sirius with a brutish shove and slams his empty glass on the bar, heaving himself back to loom close enough to Sirius’ face that Sirius almost reaches for his wand without thinking. “Alley,” the man growls. 

Sirius feels anger rise in his cheeks along with adrenaline while the man stalks his way out the side door, digging frantically for a handful of coins and trying to ignore the stares of several worried patrons around him. He slams the money down as he drains the last of his own ale, definitely overpaying, but he doesn’t have room to care. Sirius follows the huge man’s path before the door catches closed again, and once outside he flings it shut with summative tension on a slam that echoes faintly in the thickening dusk. 

“Now what the fuck do you want?” Sirius snaps at the man, who has been illuminated by a weak streetlamp where he stands several paces away. He’s swaying slightly with drink, but he’s digging in an inner coat pocket with one of those ungainly fucking hands of his. 

“Duel,” the man barks. He wrests out a crooked wand, stumpy and well-used, pointed at the ground at least but prompting Sirius to whip his own down his sleeve with sharp accuracy.

“Because I fuck men?” Sirius snarls. He gleans perverse enjoyment from the blind rage that squishes into the man’s expression. He tightens his fingers around the polished wand handle.

“Dirty barmy shitting sodomites,” the man says, as if each word tastes like soot. “Taking up space and ruining this town, more of you every bloody year!”

“I didn’t know there were more,” Sirius baits, enjoying the thrill of danger—it feels strangely, briefly, like the way narrowly avoiding danger did several years ago. He tries not to think about how good it feels in the moment. “Do you have their names? I do love a fresh cock.”

The grounded part of Sirius’ brain, trained into placid logic by all his time spent with Remus, is violently chiding the spark of chaotic pride flaring up through the pit of his core; _The only cock you’ve ever been able to handle without fainting from anxiety is Remus’, you numpty, you haven’t so much as_ glanced _at anyone else’s in almost twenty years. ‘I do love a fresh cock’? What does that even mean? Are they ever un-fresh? Undead cocks? Are you already plastered on 3 pints? You’re getting old._ But the gnarled-looking bigot raises his wand, and Sirius quickly mirrors the motion while his veins thrum with blackened excitement. 

“You’re making a mistake,” Sirius warns. His hand quivers, just barely, as he feels the buzz of magic surging like undertow in his wrist to wait in the wings. “If you want to leave now I’ll forget it ever hap— _you-fucking-rotten-cunt.“_

Sirius lets the rushed epithet act as his counter-jinx, the actual spell rocketing out on a wordless blast of loosed power that bursts apart in spangled white against the purple missile of magic from his assailant. His immediate verbal parry of _“Expelliarmus!”_ flashes across the dark, just barely missing as the man dodges in a messy stumble. Sirius snarls to himself as his pulse picks up, saturating his system with the pounding depth of adrenal fury. 

The man fights back with wordless magic, which makes Sirius even angrier as he scrambles to remember the proper counter-jinxes and -hexes purely based on the color and texture of the blasts. He stays himself from volleying violence with anything besides disarming spells, furious but cognizant of the danger in causing any lasting harm, even though it becomes increasingly clear his opponent holds no such reservations.

After several more tense exchanges, Sirius dodges a jagged, red bolt of fizzling magic and finally lands his charm. It sends the tosser’s wand flying beyond the alley wall, and the man drops like a heavy sack of stones. Sirius dashes over to hoist the man’s sweater collar up in a fist, expression surely maddened with exertion and hate. “Are you quite finished?” Sirius pants, glaring fully into the man’s hazed, watery glower.

“Get your hands off me,” the man spits, “Accio w—”

Sirius surprises even himself as he draws back and hits the man squarely in the temple with the hilt of his wand.

The brute crumples into unconsciousness before he can summon the scattered wand while Sirius’ instinct shrieks with the white noise of twinned panic—the bastard would have probably used a fucking Killing Curse, he looked angry enough, this is self defense, his own preservation. But now Sirius is standing over half a giant out cold, the predicament looking like _—oh fucking, buggering shit._

Two resounding cracks of Apparition burst into the alley, and a pair of Aurors are suddenly standing in front of Sirius. The look terribly official and quite unamused.

“We’ve received a complaint of magical delinquency, what do you think you’re doing?” the Auror on Sirius’ left demands, her gaze flicking across the scene with cataloguing quickness. 

“I—we were dueling, he dragged me out here, from the pub,” Sirius blurts. 

“Sirius Black?” The second Auror steps closer, squinting, the well-barbered sheen of his tidy blonde mustache catching a glint off the streetlamp looming above them all. _Titus Calder, cheers, snogged you in an empty classroom in year four,_ Sirius’ memory immediately drawls, detached from the moment of chaos as his blasted inner voice always seems to be.

“He was raring to kill me,” Sirius states more clearly. He uncurls his fingers from the fusty crush of the man’s sweater and steps back to let the massive body loll to the ground completely, while the woman Auror casts about with a wide gesture for the missing wand. Sirius swallows around ebbing exhilaration and catches her eye. “I disarmed him.”

“And then you what, thumped him on the head for good measure?” Calder asks snidely, and at once Sirius remembers why he hadn’t continued meeting the boy for a romp at school after that first encounter. 

“He was summoning his wand back. He might have killed me,” Sirius repeats steadily. Thank fuck his voice isn’t trembling yet. 

“Your wand please,” The woman says with an outstretched, black-gloved hand. The other holds the retrieved, wood-knotted wand from wherever it had flown. Her words are not a request.

Sirius passes the springy length of black ash wood to the Auror and keeps both of his hands out of his pockets, unmoving and awkward. The Auror casts a spell log charm on both wands, and Sirius watches with abashed obedience while she takes her time poking through the list of spells that float out in order from most recent to the oldest remaining in the each core’s memory. There’s a little under a month back left in Sirius’ fox fur core and only about a week of whatever sorry, half-squib excuse for quality the other wand has.

“That’s a lot of liquid charms, your girlfriend alright?” Calder jokes nastily, clearly not catching the tide of the atmosphere and so he jumps when Sirius fixes a glare at him that could melt rubber.

“Projecting, are we, Titus?” Sirius snaps.

Calder bristles as color rises in his cheeks and his hackles raise. “That’s _Auror Calder_ to you, Black—”

“Boys.”

The Auror examining Sirius’ wand is looking at both men with the sort of exasperation Remus reserves for authors who whinge about spelling corrections. Sirius mutters a vague apology and redirects his eyes to the pavement until the woman Auror heaves a light sigh and extends Sirius’ wand back toward him. He takes it gently and re-sleeves it without directly meeting her eyes.

“You were only firing disarming charms,” she begins, lightening Sirius’ heart with the euphoria of relief for the briefest moment before crashing it back down—“but we still have to take you in overnight to serve the time for disrupting the peace in the presence of Muggles.”

“This is a wizarding pub!” Sirius sputters, careful not to fling an arm out in disbelief lest he serve them a reason to be struck with Stupefy by an uppity blonde Auror.

“…located less than fifty meters from a Muggle hotel,” the woman finishes patiently. Sirius clenches down hard on his back teeth to keep from saying something rash to make the overnight sentence even longer. Silence sits between the three— _four, arse-fuck’s body on the tarmac_ —before the woman Auror adjusts the hem of her uniform jacket in finality. “Calder, make sure this man gets to a holding cell with a clear head for questioning.”

“And while you’re in there, maybe wash away the part of his brain that makes him want to murder nancies,” Sirius says bitterly, without thinking. Calder shoots him a look but doesn’t respond, hoisting the brute’s shoulder as he draws his wand from a belt holster and Apparates them into the night. Sirius blushes at the outburst and tries to ignore the flat, studious stare from the Auror left with him.

“Come on then. I’m Auror Willen, let’s make this as painless as possible for the both of us.”

—

Summarily fingerprinted and affixed with a pair of jinxed cuffs that, while allowing him to freely move his arms, look like shitty bangles and mute Sirius’ magic, Sirius sulks into a tiny white room to use the single Muggle telephone left for reaching loved ones.

A single Muggle telephone. At the Ministry headquarters. _I will never understand the machinations of this garbage fucking government._

As he hooks the rotary dial through the march of numbers that will connect him to the Muggle phone Remus has kept on their kitchen counter, Sirius hopes he hasn’t been left hanging for as long as the evening has felt so far. The line rings twice before it clatters to life on the other end.

_“Sirius ruddy cock-sucking bloody Black, where the fuck have you been?!”_

Alright then.

Sirius winces at the exacting fury in Remus’ voice and tries for levity. “Cheers, love you too—”

_“Do you have any idea what it feels like to go to the pub, know I’m already bloody late, try to order a pint, be told by Gwen—fucking Gwen fucking Davies!—that ‘ooo, well, not an hour ago Sirius sized up against some great brute,’ before Lysander cuts in, serves me the ale I didn’t even get to fucking DRINK, and says yeah, you kipped off into the bloody fucking alley to duel—you! Duel! A big barmy fucker, do you have ANY idea?!”_

Sirius listens patiently to Remus’ tirade, his insides knotting with shame for leaving him in the dark. The phone crackles mightily with the force of his voice, grating Sirius’ ear with each peaked syllable. When Remus finishes shouting down the line, Sirius hears him take a steadying breath and wait in silence for Sirius to explain himself. 

“Hi,” Sirius says gently.

_“Are you hurt.”_ Remus rarely asks his questions in interrogatives when he’s upset. 

“No. I disarmed him and knocked him out.”

_“What the fuck did he do, Sirius, why did you have to duel him within bounds of fucking Muggles, I can’t even—Christ, Sirius, you can’t DO that.”_

Sirius glances over his shoulder to make sure nobody is listening too closely before he cups the telephone receiver closer to his mouth. “He called you a fairy, Rem,” he mutters, “said he’d seen you there with me before and was going on about how ‘it’s not natural,’ what was I supposed to do?”

_“Lay low!”_ Remus cries, _“Fucking ignore him! Nobody can ever prove we’re shagging and we’re never affectionate like that in public, why would you give somebody that sort of fodder?”_

“Excuse me for wanting to protect you!” Sirius grips the receiver hard enough to feel his blunt fingernails bite his palms, fighting to keep from shouting in return with frustration rising in his throat like bile.

Remus sighs again, long and exhausted and thick with words unsaid, and Sirius’ heart flexes painfully at the way it sounds like wind leaving his sails. _“I don’t need protecting, Pads. If anything I need a fucking invisibility cloak, ready at hand at all times. I can’t have you taking every poor sod who looks at me wrong into the back alley, after all I’M the fu—”_

“Fine, upstanding gentlemen who is currently charming me out of my very shoes on this telephone provided to me so kindly by the Ministry of Magic,” Sirius says with crisp quickness, his lungs leaping into his throat when he’s sure the end of that sentence would have been _—cking werewolf;_ who knows what sort of dictation spells the Ministry has woven into this phone line, scrawling away on some endless sheaf of parchment in somebody’s office?

Remus is silent for a moment in arrested thought, the telephone line hissing its vague noise in the interim. _“Thank you. I’m—I’m quite worked up, that was stupid of me,”_ he murmurs eventually.

“I’m sorry,” Sirius offers with simple candor.

_“I know.”_ There’s a sound on the other end that sounds like Remus pulling out one of the kitchen chairs and sitting heavily. _“How long do you have to stay?”_

“Overnight, I can return in the morning.” Sirius is only halfway surprised at the forlorn pull in his guts at the idea of spending a night without Remus next to him.

_“Don’t shag your cellmate, tell them you’ve got plague,”_ Remus teases gently, which brings a welcome dose of lightness to Sirius’ mood. He smirks into the receiver and looks about once more—still marginally alone in the room, only one bored-looking Auror by the door who looks like she’s deemed Sirius no threat to anyone at all besides himself and is currently engrossed in a Muggle penny novel.

“I’ll have a cell by myself, I’m the only idiot who managed to get himself get nipped for minor delinquency tonight,” he explains in a murmur. “Sorry I’ve left you alone, but surely you can fend for yourself…?”

_“Morgana’s peachy arse, did you honestly just tell me to Have A Good Wank through the Ministry’s telephone line?! You—”_

“What can I say, criminal life has changed me, Moony.”

 _“Jesus jinxed, I’ll see you in the morning, you minge,”_ Remus says, and Sirius feels a bit of the weight leave his shoulders to hear the hint of a laugh in Remus’ voice. _“STOP DEFENDING MY HONOR. I mean it. I love you.”_

“Love you more,” Sirius hums, “Goodnight.” He waits to hear the click of Remus’ end of the line before hanging the receiver back on its hook. He jumps when the Auror at the door clears her throat.

“You’d better buy him some really flash stuff tomorrow, ‘ant heard someone so mad in ages,” she says with airy boredom. When she opens the door and urges Sirius back out to the main Auror offices to await his cell for the night, he can’t quite find his sarcasm buried in the evening’s layers of embarrassment.

—

“Holy blood on water, you have got to be kidding me.”

Sirius looks up from his half-asleep lean against the back of the Ministry cell with a groan rousted from the very pit of his being. “Evening, James.”

James Potter looks ridiculous in his Auror uniform, which is to say vaguely handsome in an incongruous manner similar to how he’d looked in dress robes on his wedding day. Gawping at Sirius as if he’d just risen from the dead isn’t helping his efforts to look professional. “What did you do!” He hisses with conspiratorial wickedness, leaning nearer to the bars. On the opposite end of Remus, ever since they were in school, James’ eager questions always turn into exclamations. 

“Big loud berk tried to duel me to shit outside the Mandrake,” Sirius says around a wide yawn. _Three pints and no food later, no wonder you’re fucking exhausted._ “I disarmed him, he went unconscious, and two of your lovely colleagues snapped me up for delinquency against Secrecy law.”

“Shit,” James breathes, eyes wide behind his glasses and tamping down a grin despite himself. All the authority in the world could never draw the prankster streak out of him. “What is it then, overnight?”

“Overnight,” Sirius confirms drolly as he proffers his wrists to spotlight the cuffs. 

James shifts the sheaf of parchment in the crook of arm and sighs to himself. “I’d say sorry, but it’s kind of righteous to see you trussed up for once—“

“Take a picture then, you poof,” Sirius snorts. He shows his best mate both of his middle fingers and smirks at the laughter that bounds out of James. When the brief bolt of boyish joy clears, James seems to waffle for a moment where he stands beyond the cell’s bars and out of reach. Sirius is struck for a moment with a shiver of dissonance at the image of the two of them separated like this, by occupation and deed alike—if only on the surface level, but it still stings with the brief seizure of his veins. They’ve never before been comparable as opposites, only ever parallels. He asks to clear the sudden clouding of his mind, “How’s Harry?”

“Almost 6 and making it known,” James says with weary pride. “He hasn’t shown magic yet and Lily is, between you and me, losing her head over it.”

“Well what were _you,_ 8?” Sirius asks. He keeps down the fact that he started showing ability in the cradle, and Remus almost immediately from the womb if his mother’s stories were to be believed.

“10,” James corrects with a conciliatory raise of his eyebrows. “I’m not worried at all, but you know how worked up Lily can get.”

“She and Remus can commiserate. He just chewed me to filth on the telephone, which _by the way,_ why the fuck does the Ministry have a telephone instead of a Floo connection?”

“I’m going to hold in my innuendo. Budget.”

“Budget.”

“Adding a new branch to the Floo network is expensive, Pads.”

“Merlin you’ve gone soft. What do they put in those uniforms, downers?” Sirius mitigates the slice of his jibe with half a grin, but the pull in his stomach makes it clear to his subconscious that his disappointment in James’ newfound straight-lacing, however marginal is really is, rings true. Sirius supposes it’s immature of him to wish more often than not that the man with a marriage and a child was more like the teenager he bonded with so readily all those years ago, but obstinance might as well be his middle name. 

“Uppers, actually. Haven’t slept in days,” James sallies back with a waggle of his eyebrows. “Anyways. There’s a briefing in five minutes I’m absolutely not supposed to be late for. If I don’t see you before you’re a free man again, come over for dinner sometime soon. Haven’t seen Remus in ages!”

“Ta, go be a functioning wizard of society,” Sirius says flippantly as he smiles his genuine farewells. He watches James go back through the office, around the evening shift of clerks busy at their desks, and hopes James doesn’t find himself swallowed in the maw of bureaucracy like far too many of their peers. 

—

“Oi.”

Sirius starts awake, his neck aching with a fierce cramp from his slump against the wall and so he winces through the muzziness of dragging himself into sorts. He blinks several times to bring the vague royal blue splotch in front of him into focus. 

“You’re free to go,” announces this new Auror, a slender man with close-cropped hair, as he taps his wand once on the heavy cell lock. “Collect your wand at the desk just over there, Floo access is up four floors. Hope you’ve learned your lesson, whatever it was.”

“Cheers,” Sirius says with a creaking voice. He unfolds himself from the uncomfortable fold against the cell wall, taking his time to stretch the cricks out of his muscles before he catches the Auror watching him with a frown. “What, I can’t kick out the rust that your own lodgings caused?”

“Don’t waste time, get your wand and off you go.” To accent his point, the Auror turns on his heel to leave the cell with the door hanging open behind him. Sirius can’t be sure if the locks will charm shut again when they set to, so he growls a short string of curses under his breath and stumbles into a brisk clip out of the cell and into the office proper. He automatically ties back his hair and smoothes down the front of his shirt when a couple clerks glance up at him, and he searches quickly for the elevator bank to the exit. The parallels of the morning call to mind his flight from the same space with Remus two years ago, a thought in which Sirius doesn’t quite take solace.

Sirius fetches his wand from the clerk’s desk by the exit, not quite appreciating the sallow judgement in the older man’s eyes when he unloops a numbered ticket from its hilt. “Dueling in public not quite worth it, eh?”

In lieu of answering with the proper venom coiled up behind his teeth, Sirius merely shoots a stiff grin before stalking to the elevators. Being surrounded by so much… _order_ has been grating on him. He’s in desperate need of a bit of clutter. He hopes Remus hasn’t cleaned the flat in the last several hours.

Whipping through the Floo network wakes Sirius up a bit, but not by too much. Soon enough he steps over the hearth as he peers into the open stillness of and sitting room and the kitchen on his way to hang his coat up on the rack by the entryway. The balconette doors in the kitchen are shut tight but the window by the radio is still cracked open, belying Remus’ morning cigarette. Sirius toes off his boots and walks quietly to the half-shut door to the study. 

Remus doesn’t turn when the hinges creak, bowed low and close over a manuscript that takes up most of the desktop, but Sirius sees his shoulders twitch with a hint of relaxation at his entry despite the stubborn refusal to act like Sirius’ return is worth any sort of celebration. Sirius can’t ignore the prickle of adoration in him at the simple show of insolence. 

“Back from beyond,” Sirius hums with feigned gravity in his tone.

“I’ll call you Lazarus,” Remus says perfunctorily, still not looking up. Sirius takes a single step closer and Remus keeps scrawling across the page—neat little quill strokes, insistent as ever, his nose just centimeters from the page, _Is he—?_

“Rem, are you squinting?” Sirius asks, coming up beside the desk with a buzz of worry drumming up just behind his throat. Remus has been wearing his reading glasses more often, not just in the later hours anymore, and Sirius has tried to write it off as a quirk of him forgetting they were there—but the man’s actions in Sirius’ absence have always spoken the loudest volumes. They’re all getting older and although Sirius tries to ignore it more and more with each passing year, the moon has accelerated plans for Remus. 

Remus finally looks up, frowning slightly as he removes the glasses to bare the mossy depth of his eyes to the morning light. “It’s early. Hallo, love,” he insists softly. Sirius almost opens his mouth to protest again, _What else are you covering up, what other little terrifying changes are you, have you BEEN hiding from me when I’m not looking?_ But Sirius’ neck aches and his own eyes are weak with fatigue, so he forgets preoccupation when Remus tugs at the hem of his shirt to pull him down for a kiss. His lips are soft and very, very tired. Probably didn’t sleep at all.

“I missed you,” Sirius says against Remus’ mouth. They trade another slow, indolent kiss before Sirius pulls back. “I really am sorry. He just was so—“

“Save it, Sirius, please. It’s alright,” Remus cuts him off with surgical accuracy, his hand still gripping Sirius’ shirt and now holding tighter. “I’ve a moon in two nights and I don’t need help getting worked up again.”

Of course there’s a moon in two nights. There’s always something looming over him, isn’t there? Such perfect wonder couldn’t exist without some acrid fucking footnote of tragedy, disaster, too much pain to ever look at full-on lest Sirius lose his mind with the inevitability if it all.

Despite the racing pickup of existential dread, Sirius opens his mouth to say something witty yet comforting, his best armor against feeling defeated by Remus’ affliction. But he finds his mind blank when he tries to delve into his backlogs of warm sarcasm—in a flash of minor terror, Sirius feels the backs of his eyes tingling suddenly with the threat of building tears; terror muted but mirrored in the way Remus’ eyes widen slightly in response. _Shit._ Sirius knows it isn’t helpful at all to cry about it, but he’s exhausted and what else can he do? It just fucking hurts. 

The two men blurt the sounds of strangled bromides over one another for a moment before Remus falls quiet and encourages Sirius to _Go first_ with a gentle nod of his head. His hand is still clutching the cotton hem between them.

“Sorry,” Sirius repeats with a strained voice, feeling the warm crawl of tears spilling over. He swipes frantically at his cheeks to wipe them away, clear his head, but Remus catches his wrists to hold onto them gently. 

“This isn’t about getting arrested,” Remus surmises with a soft voice. Sirius coughs out a dry laugh and shakes his head, letting more tears fall in earnest. 

“I just—I guess,” Sirius replies, words false-starting like an engine turnover until the cogs of his addled mind lock in and he spews his thoughts; “I saw James there looking very mature and official, and I thought ‘fuck, we’re all getting older,’ and then I suppose my shit-brain has been sitting on the idea of you getting older for a long time, and I—I don’t want to think about that, Rem, because I don’t—I can’t kn—I don’t know how long you’ve got left, love, it—fucking kills me.” Sirius finishes with a ragged gasp and dissolves into the leaping jags of weeping. He clings to the lunar-warm solidity of Remus’ hands in his own and bows his head against Remus’ chest, the only bright spots he can reach in this moment beneath the blackened depths of this sudden and jarring misery.

“Oh.” Remus’ voice is gentle as he extracts one hand from Sirius’ hold and eases it beneath the drape of black hair across the back of Sirius’ neck, protective as he can be against the lances of fear. _Oh,_ a lifetime of understanding and commiseration seated in a single word— _Oh I adore you, Oh I understand, Oh this is a shit hand we’ve been dealt after all, Oh I never want to move from this spot with you._ Sirius hears it all, knows his own voice would have broken around the syllable had he been the one to say it. Remus is stronger. Remus has always been stronger. 

They remain where they are for a bittersweet stretch of time, perfect reference for an unmade marble statue by the anonymous artists of Memory and Space. Sirius cries until his throat goes dry, and Remus holds fast to him throughout. When Sirius looks up from his kneel before the chair, he hopes his eyes aren’t too shabby around their reddened edges. Regardless, Remus smiles sadly at him as if Sirius had brought the sun round in the morning.

“Feel better?” He asks softly. 

“Yeah.” Sirius’ voice grates like a tarmac rash. He moves to stand, but Remus doesn’t let go of his hands. 

“Sirius, I don’t want you to worry about this.” Remus doesn’t plead, has never pleaded for anything a day in his life outside of the bedroom. His voice is even as he continues softly; “It’s been—a long time coming, for me, I suppose. I’ve always known I wouldn’t make it to pension or see myself go completely grey, so thinking about it for me is sort of...inevitable? I don’t know the word for it. It’s not like I’m looking forward to it, but I—I know it will be there earlier than is convenient. I have for a long, long time. So I appreciate that it’s hitting you now, but I don’t want you shouldering this for me, alright?” Remus smoothes a hand over Sirius’ cheek, rough with the morning’s lack of a shave, when Sirius’ eyes start to well up on their own volition to hear Remus talk about the stark truth so honestly. “You’re good at fixing things, but this is one thing that tinkering can’t cure. It’s a curse, love. Trust me, I’ve tried.”

“You’re going to die before I do,” Sirius says weakly. The truth sears his tongue. 

“Quite probably,” Remus murmurs. He smiles again with gentle mournfulness and Sirius’ heart fractures. 

“Fucking hell,” Sirius sobs, scraping tears off his face with the shoulder of his shirt, “you’re so calm.”

“I’ve had 20 years to grapple with this, why do you think I was such a cagey shit as a boy? And you honestly think I would have held in the floodgates of admitting I love you for so long if I had nothing to lose?” Remus betrays a slip of his own emotion for the first time as his lips tremble slightly before he presses them together, dispelling the stutter of feeling with expert acuity. “I have everything to lose. I always have. But you’ve made that a hell of a lot easier to bear.”

Sirius can’t summon words past the riot of release and despair, so he catches Remus in a long and clamant kiss that he hopes does all the translating for him—both hands cradling the sides of Remus’ face, thumbs tracing soft paths of sweet nothings against his skin and the subtle waves of hair at his temples, lips intent to say _As long as you are here, I am nothing if not yours._

Sirius has stopped actively crying by the time he draws back, but his face is still marked with the swollen remnants of weeping. Remus offers him another wistful half-smile. 

“You’re lucky you still look utterly gorgeous after a good cry,” Remus murmurs. A single yelp of serrated, unbidden laughter claws its way out of Sirius’ throat. It burns the whole way up.

“I’m lucky you still think so.” Sirius feels that his voice sounds thick with the caustic mixture of emotions running rampant in his guts so he finally stands, still holding one of Remus’ hands in his. “Tea?”

Remus kisses his knuckles before releasing him and, as only Remus Lupin could after discussing the fact of his own mortality, replaces his reading glasses to tuck back into his work. “Please; breakfast blend.”

Sirius doesn’t shut the study door fully behind him, leaving it open by just enough. As he moves into the kitchen his mind is a suspended chord of white noise, fuzzy with the fresh wound of imminent and looming grief but packed tight by the solid reassurance from Remus’ presence—still here, still working, still bloody fucking perfect. He sets to making tea with robotic surety, charms the kettle with a hoarse command and plops two teabags into two empty mugs. His hands are still shaking slightly with the residual charge of panicked crying. 

This all makes sense. Sirius supposes, while he lovingly drenches each sachet of tea with steaming water, that he’s been bodily avoiding the labor of facing this head-on for several years. The flu that rolled in before they went to Skegness had probably been the start of it; Sirius had never seen Remus that depleted outside of a moon before. Sirius examines all the ways he’s been burying the realization if Remus’ looming fate since then as he edges open the balconette window to spark a quick cigarette to life as he lets the tea steep. Chief among them he decides he’s been very good at ignoring the burrowing pain in his heart by fucking it away, dancing around any conversation regarding general impermanence with his own brand of wordplay and impudence, constantly telling his own unconscious that Remus is _right here in front of me_ so clearly can’t be approaching death at any turn too soon—Sirius clenches his jaw against another swell of emotion and stabs his cigarette out on the edge of the door, transfiguring the end into ashes to brush out into the air before pulling the door shut. _Fuck_. This isn’t going to be easy.

But if anything about Remus had ever been easy, would it have felt so perfectly sound to lie down with him at the end of every day for the past seven years?

Sirius does his best to shut off his mind. The best thing he can be right now is Remus’ rock, for whenever the inevitable shattering that accompanies that tremble of his chin can’t bear to be tamped down any longer. Neither of them can know when the last straw will snap, but Sirius can be ready.

He sets one of the teacups on the desk beside Remus’ left hand, presses a kiss into the honey-brown crown of his head, and quietly assumes the sentinel place in the armchair by the window with a very long book.

**Author's Note:**

> Hallo! Sorry this one took a bit, the holidays happened and then work picked up a bit, and then I got smacked with a stomach flu, and then and then AND THEN. Not my favorite of the series, but one that definitely had to come about. Another reason things were a bit delayed/ensuing parts will have a bit more space between publishing than usual: I'm writing a novel!! Longtime goal of mine, finally in the works. We'll see how it goes--I'm not going away from works here by any means, they'll just be more spread-out.
> 
> Thank you again for reading, you're wonderful ^^


End file.
